Mensch tracht, und Gott lacht

Monday, November 26, 2007

A War on Christmas Question

Now that it's officially the "silly season," when all sorts of mostly inconsequential disputes break out over what to call that tree in the airport lounge or how close the Santa has to be to the manger in order for the creche to stay in the town square, I have a question, dear readers.

My mailbox is being assaulted by scads of catalogs, all urging me to "buy! buy! buy!" if I really love my wife and children. (And I do mean assaulted - I noticed yesterday that my mailbox post has a large crack in it - I'm sure it was the 50th LL Bean catalog that did it). Now, of course, they all want me to buy presents for "the Holidays," but just as surely they swathe the catalogs in red and green and cram in as much "Christmas" imagery as they can. More generally, we might say they trade on the idea of Christmas in order to get you to buy without mentioning it as a way of avoiding offense to those who don't celebrate Christmas.

Fine and dandy. I find the whole image/word thing pretty ironic, but kind of humorous as well. My question is this: would people who don't celebrate Christmas be particularly offended if, say, Toy Company X just switched out "Christmas" for "Holiday"? Would it be a problem? My sense is that it wouldn't and that the companies are being, well, prematurely non-offensive, but I'm not really in a good position to say, since we're pretty big on keeping the "Christ" in Christ-mas around our household. Any thoughts?

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